Author's Notes

I
was born 5 years after the Munich Disaster, and it was to
be a further two decades before I saw Manchester United
play 'live' for the first time (Spartak Varna in the
1983/84 Cup Winners Cup, since you asked). Because those
terrible events took place a quarter of a decade before I
passed through the Old Trafford turnstiles for the first
time, the crash always seemed to me to belong to a
previous generation; this despite my passing the Munich
Clock every time I went to watch United, and despite the
club's continuing obsession with European glory, no doubt
fired at least in part by the ultimate price paid by many
of its finest players in pursuit of the European Cup.

Thus, this web site. The site is my
attempt, as the 40th anniversary of the Munich disaster
nears, to revisit the team of 1958, to put the tragedy
into some sort of context without the benefit (or
hindrance) of hindsight.

The obvious drawback to
this approach is that the main site contains no information about the crash
itself, such as those who died or survived, or the causes
of the accident. Therefore, the facts of the matter are
laid out briefly below.

The Background

United, then English champions for two years
running and aiming for a third, had just won a place in
the European Cup semi-finals, courtesy of a 3-3 draw away to Red Star Belgrade. On the
journey back to Manchester, on Thursday February 6th
1958, their plane, a twin-engined BEA Elizabethan
airliner, Lord Burghley, touched down at Munich Riem
airport to refuel. Then the weather began to deteriorate.

The pilot made two
abortive attempts to take-off in the snow; the third
attempt was disastrous. As the pilot tried to get the
plane airborne, it overshot the end of the runway,
clipped a house and crashed.

Matt Busby, manager and architect of United's
success, was given the last rites, but eventually pulled
through. United players Jackie Blanchflower
and John Berry, though they too survived, never
played again thanks to their injuries.

The German Court of
Inquiry, reporting eleven years after the event,
concluded that snow on the runway was the most probable
cause of the crash, and that though the pilot, Captain
James Thain, had deviated from normal procedure, those
deviations had not actually caused the accident.
Suggestions that ice on the plane's wings had contributed
were discounted.

Frank Swift

Amongst
the journalists who lost their lives at Munich
was Frank Swift, the former Manchester City and
England goalkeeper. He watched City lose the 1933
F.A. Cup final from the Wembley terraces, but
returned the following season to play for them as
they lifted the Cup, beating Portsmouth 2-1. At
the final whistle, the then-teenage keeper
fainted on his goal-line, and had to be revived
before he could collect his medal.

The
John Lukic Question

There
is a football trivia question that asks:
"Which Premiership player survived
the Munich disaster?" The answer given is
John Lukic, the former Arsenal and Leeds
goalkeeper, the reasoning supposedly being that
his mother, pregnant with him at the time, was a
survivor of the crash.

This is simply an urban
myth. Apart from anything else, Lukic wasn't born
until 11th December 1960, which would make his
mother's pregancy one of the longest on record.
There was a Mrs. Lukic on board the Lord
Burghley, together with her baby daughter - both
of them survived the crash. But this Mrs. Lukic,
who was the wife of the Yugoslav ambassador to
London, was not the mother of John.

The Aftermath

The
nation mourned (no, really), but United carried on as
best they could. Two matches were postponed; the crucial
league game with leaders Wolves on the following
Saturday, and the 5th round FA Cup tie with Sheffield
Wednesday the Saturday after that. With Matt Busby still
in hospital in Germany, assistant manager Jimmy Murphy
took over, and cobbled together a team of Munich
survivors, youth team players and emergency transfers for
the next game, the rearranged Sheffield Wednesday tie,
which took place on Wednesday, 19th February, less than a
fortnight after the crash. United ran riot, beating
Wednesday (albeit a team propping up the league) 3-0. Two
days later, Duncan Edwards died.

United managed to keep a run going in the
Cup, getting all the way to Wembley, where Nat Lofthouse
and Bolton Wanderers beat them 2-0. In the other
competitions, it was a different story, as the team were
knocked out of the European Cup by AC Milan in the
semi-finals. (Red Star Belgrade, incidentally, had made
representation to UEFA that United be declared honorary
European champions of 1958. UEFA, perhaps understandably,
declined the suggestion, but offered United automatic
entry into the following year's competition. The English
FA, however, refused to allow United to accept the
offer.)

In the league United faded
badly, winning only one of their fourteen post-Munich
fixtures. Eventually they finished 9th, twenty-one points
behind the champions, Wolves. It was 1963 before United
won another trophy, with an FA Cup win over Leicester;
they had to wait until 1965 for their next championship.

Other
Tragedies

United
are by no means the only team to have suffered
this kind of loss. In fact, they are by no means
the team that has suffered the most.

In 1949, the Torino
team that was dominating Italian football and
providing much of the Italian national side was
decimated when the plane carrying them back to
Turin from a match in Portugal crashed. 31 died,
including 18 Torino players.

In 1961, 24
players died when the plane carrying the Green
Cross team of Santiago, Chile, crashed
in the Las Lastimas mountains.

In 1969, 19
players and officials of Bolivian side The
Strongest died as their plane came down
in the Andes.

In 1979, 17
members of the Soviet side Pakhtakor
Tashkent were killed in a plane crash
whilst en route to a league match.

In 1987, 43
players, officials' wives and supporters of Alianza
Lima lost their lives when their plane
crashed into the sea whilst bringing the team
home to the Peruvian capital.

In 1993, 18
members of the highly rated Zambia
international side were killed when their plane
crashed into the sea off Gabon as it took the
squad to play a World Cup qualifier against
Senegal.

Sources

I've garnered the information in this site
from various sources - nothing has been made up. All the
statistics on the player pages are correct as at 6th
February 1958, as far as I can make out. The league table
is as it was on the morning of the crash, and the news
stories, results and match reports were put together from
newspaper accounts of the time. In particular I used
pieces by Archie Ledbrooke in the Daily Mirror and Don
Davies in the Manchester Guardian, and uncredited reports
in the Daily Telegraph And Morning Post. Ledbrooke and
Davies were amongst those who died at Munich.

The appearance and goalscoring
statistics were calculated from "The Manchester
United Factfile", an MS Access application available
from Electronic Sports Data. This database contains an
enormous amount of data about United matches from the
very first Newton Heath match onwards. For more
information, use the links in the section below.

Much of the other
information comes from a number of books, all of which
are recommended.

The following are available from Amazon.co.uk. Click
on the links for more information.

Links

For an alternative website dedicated to the Busby Babes,
visit thebusbybabes.com. This site replicates much of the content of Red Cafe's Munich Memorial, which includes a picture of the memorial
stained-glass window to Duncan Edwards in St. Francis'
church, Dudley, and the lyrics to The Flowers Of
Manchester.

You can find Mike Thomas' Munich site at www.munich58.co.uk. This
site has downloads, and an interesting collection of features. Mike has also
built a Duncan Edwards tribute site.

Dave Menashe's
site has a chapter about Edwards' death from Arthur Hopcraft's
The Football Man.

The Theatre Of
Dreams contains another Duncan Edwards piece, including an evaluation by
Terry Venables that is well worth reading.

Toro On The Net is a site dedicated to Torino FC, who suffered a very
similar tragedy in 1949. The site includes an account of that tragedy, and profiles of the Torino
squad of the era.